that the other was the first man of his time and country.  “They say,” in Portsmouth, that Mason did not shrink from remonstrating with his friend upon his carelessness with regard to money; but, finding the habit inveterate and the man irresistible, desisted.  Webster himself says that two thousand dollars a year was all that the best practice in New Hampshire could be made to yield; and that that was inadequate to the support of his family of a wife and three little children.  Two thousand dollars in Portsmouth, in 1812, was certainly equal, in purchasing power, to six thousand of the ineffectual things that now pass by the name of dollars; and upon such an income large families in a country town contrive to live, ride, and save.

He was a strenuous Federalist at Portsmouth, took a leading part in the public meetings of the party, and won great distinction as its frequent Fourth-of-July orator.  All those mild and economical measures by which Mr. Jefferson sought to keep the United States from being drawn into the roaring vortex of the great wars in Europe, he opposed, and favored the policy of preparing the country for defence, not by gunboats and embargoes, but by a powerful navy of frigates and ships of the line.  His Fourth-of-July orations, if we may judge of them by the fragments that have been found, show that his mind had strengthened more than it had advanced.  His style wonderfully improved from eighteen to twenty-five; and he tells us himself why it did.  He discovered, he says, that the value, as well as the force, of a sentence, depends chiefly upon its meaning, not its language; and that great writing is that in which much is said in few words, and those words the simplest that will answer the purpose.  Having made this notable discovery, he became a great eraser of adjectives, and toiled after simplicity and directness.  Mr. Everett quotes a few sentences from his Fourth-of-July oration of 1806, when he was twenty-four, which shows an amazing advance upon the effort of his eighteenth year, quoted above:—­

“Nothing is plainer than this:  if we will have commerce, we must protect it.  This country is commercial as well as agricultural. Indissoluble bonds connect him who ploughs the land with him who ploughs the sea.  Nature has placed us in a situation favorable to commercial pursuits, and no government can alter the destination.  Habits confirmed by two centuries are not to be changed.  An immense portion of our property is on the waves.  Sixty or eighty thousand of our most useful citizens are there, and are entitled to such protection from the government as their case requires.”

How different this compact directness from the tremendous fulmination of the Dartmouth junior, who said:—­